ICLEI Africa engages with 50 African cities on Disaster Risk Reduction

ICLEI Africa supported each city to carry out a self-assessment, using UNISDR’s Disaster Resilience Scorecard for Cities. The engagements provided an opportunity for the cities to rate their disaster preparedness in line with the ten essentials for Making Cities Resilient, including governance, finance, planning, institutional capacity, multi-stakeholder involvement and more.

Overall, the project highlighted an opportunity to increase disaster preparedness in the cities. The main barriers identified in contributing to this under-preparedness were:

• Lack of a specific disaster risk reduction mandate within local governments, leading to little or no resource allocation for disaster risk reduction tasks.
• Limited understanding of disaster, climate change and related issues by municipal officials.
• Lack of disaster risk reduction data to feed into decision-making processes.
• Severe resource and capacity shortages, which make tackling disaster risk reduction challenging.

Whilst most of the cities we engaged with are hampered by these challenges, they recognise the value of disaster risk reduction, with many municipal officials going above and beyond to enact disaster risk reduction actions, despite difficult circumstances. City officials welcomed the opportunity to learn, engage and participate in workshops around disaster risk reduction. Peer-to-peer learning exchanges were particularly useful for benchmarking and knowledge sharing. It is clear that further capacity development and much resource provision towards disaster risk reduction is needed to ensure our cities are fully prepared, and ICLEI Africa aims to walk this road with the cities we serve in Africa.

For more information on the project, please contact Belinda Mills at Belinda.mills@iclei.org.

A list of cities that took part in the assessment is provided below: